


A Story About Golems

by Bobsled_Hostage



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-07
Updated: 2016-05-07
Packaged: 2018-06-06 23:26:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6774484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bobsled_Hostage/pseuds/Bobsled_Hostage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the death of her parents by plague, a golem does its best to care for their one surviving daughter, until one day she goes missing.</p><p>Written for OJ's <a href="https://eternity-braid.tumblr.com/post/138818323984/made-in-mans-image">Made In Man's Image</a> setting</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It was called  _ Homo Lutum _ .  The Cleric who had fashioned it, not an especially dutiful student of the liturgical language, had told the couple it meant ‘Clay Man,’ which is what they called it more often than not.  Not terribly imaginative of them.

That Priest was dead now, carried off by disease along with the rest of the manor.  The great house sat silent and empty.  The lord and his lady lay pestilent and rotting in the family crypt, heirs slain on some foreign campaign, bones trampled to dust under the hobnails of heathen boots.  With their liege and his immediate familial relations departed to the Kingdom of Heaven, and with nobody in that plague scourged land arriving to take ownership of the estate, the family carried on as they had for years.  Either some distant cousin bearing forged titles would ride in with entourage in tow to return them to serfdom, or they would live out the rest of their days as yeomen farmers.  It made little difference to them.  

It wasn’t long before they too fell to the great dying, stinking buboes sprouting from their lymph nodes, blood pouring forth from their mouths in great gouts of vomit.  All of them but the youngest daughter.


	2. Chapter 2

Clay Man tromped back from the freshly tilled field, carrying the plough over its shoulder.  It would sign to Emma that once she was done with the ducks it would be time for her to sow the seeds.  The girl handled whatever required a light touch, while Clay Man handled everything requiring strength.  Though it could push a plow, thresh grain and carry more than twice its own weight, its manual dexterity was utterly hopeless.  It recalled her laughing at its pitiful attempts to darn a ruined stocking, despairing at its efforts to even thread the length of string through the eye of the needle.   _ Silly clay man, let me do it. _

They’d seen the ruins of other golems on their rare visits to the abandoned town, a day’s travel away. Where Clay Man’s fingers were stubby, thick and suited for strength and agricultural labor, theirs had once been long, delicate and dexterous.  Suited for the deft manipulation of thread, the decanting of precious alchemical reagents, or the assembly of delicate clockwork.  All mud and smashed terracotta now.  Scattered in the streets or locked up behind doors painted with crucifixes.  Immured with their masters, stupidly performing their assigned functions until the spark had gone out and they had crumbled to dust.

Today was a good day for meat.  Clay Man could remember when not even a single animal could be wasted, when meat belonged at the lord’s table, finding its way down to the serfs only on feast days, if then.  Now, with just one mouth to feed, and the abandoned livestock of an entire manor wandering the countryside (along with abundant game, although neither of them knew how to hunt for it), it was a regular feature of its master’s diet.  Clay Man had a victim in mind: an old he-goat which had been irritatingly persistent in its efforts to devour the radishes growing in Emma’s little garden.  Clay Man would hold it while Emma slashed its throat and they would butcher it together.  The pottage would sizzle with chevon for at least the next week.  Clay Man didn’t know what meat tasted like but it knew it made its master happy.

Emma was not at the duck hutch.  She wasn’t with the goats, she wasn’t in the garden, she wasn’t at the river and she wasn’t in the field.  Clay Man plodded dutifully back to the house, hoping to find her there.

The door hung open, smashed.  Clay Man moved as fast as it could, ducking to enter the dark interior of the wattle and daub structure.  That interior was a ruin.  Pots, bowls and utensils were scattered everywhere, some of them shattered.  The set of wooden blocks it had painstakingly carved for her were strewn about haphazardly, one of them soaking in the spilled pottage near the failing embers of the fire. The beam holding up the loft had been pulled down, bringing Emma’s pallet with it.  Emma wouldn’t have done this by herself, couldn’t have.  She was nowhere to be found.  Someone had taken her.

Clay Man stood, thinking.  It recalled tales of outlaws, ones the family had heard from the former inhabitants of the hamlet.  Men who took what they wanted from others rather than tilling the land.  Who called no man master and who could be lawfully killed by anyone who came across them.  Clay Man wondered why men like that would steal anymore when there were golems who would do anything for a new master.  It wondered why anyone would take Emma.

Clay Man turned and plodded out the door.  It didn’t stop to ensure the animals were fed.  It didn’t return to the field to scatter the seeds as best it could with its gigantic fingers.  It went to find Emma and the people who had taken her.


	3. Chapter 3

Clay Man tromped down the road that snaked through the woods, looking for any sign that something living had passed by recently.  It had walked all through the night and through the morning, having no need to rest or perform basic biological functions.  A sound was audible ahead.  Not the chirping of birds or the whisper of the wind through the leaves.  A drinking song, carrying through the trees from somewhere up the road.  The golem stopped to listen as the singers drew closer.

_ -young girls are so deceiving, _

_ Sad experience teaches me _

Three people.  One clad in a gambeson, bow unstrung and carried in the hand.  One ensconced in a shirt of cuir bouilli, falchion in a belt scabbard.  One in a brilliant red surcoat, carrying a staff.  All of them swaggering drunkenly down the road, howling merrily in three different keys.  Clay Man stood up at its full height to ensure that it didn’t surprise them.  It held its hands up where they could see them, and when they stopped it signed to them as clearly as possible.

_ Hello.  I have lost my master.  Will you help me find her? _

The travellers turned and fled, off the road into the trees.  Clay Man thought about why they had run away.  Did they not understand it?  Were they outlaws?  If they were outlaws, they wouldn’t use the King’s road, as anyone finding them could in good conscience kill them.  But then, it hadn’t seen anyone on the road since it left home.  Outlaws might be the only ones left.

The golem turned and trod into the woods after them.  If they didn’t understand the signs it made with its hands, it would scrawl letters in the dirt to communicate with them.  At least one of them could probably read.  Amid the rustle of branches and the cracking of twigs under its heavy toes, Clay Man almost didn’t notice the arrow which sailed out of the undergrowth to sprout from its body.

The golem looked down at the protruding projectile, buried at least a span deep in the undifferentiated clay of its torso.  A memory swam up through the fine grained phyllosilicates of Clay Man’s mind.  Its first memory.  An icon of a naked man, contorted in agony, full of arrows as an urchin.  The Saint, protector against plague, invoked to breathe life into inert soil.  Clay Man realized dimly that the three travellers were trying to hurt it.  

Another shaft struck it in the torso, barely a thumb’s breadth above the first.  It turned to trundle away and the one clad in leather struck out with the falchion, neatly severing three of the golem’s fingers.


	4. Chapter 4

Clay Man followed the footprints away from the road, down a dirt track leading off into the hills.  They were the same heavy boot-marks it had seen leading away from the house.  It had picked up the trail.  Whoever had taken Emma had come this way.  It didn’t know what it would do if whoever had taken her wouldn’t tell it where she was.  Or if she didn’t want to go with it.

It knew what it would do if someone had hurt her.  If she was dead.

\---

Fired beehives.  A mill by a stream.  Houses.  A barn.  The tracks led to a cottage not unlike the one Emma had grown up in.  The door was larger, large even enough for Clay Man to fit under.  As though it had been constructed specifically to admit its ilk.  It purposefully pushed open the door, finding no need to smash its way inside.

A scene not unlike the one Clay Man and Emma called home:  A cauldron of pottage suspended over a fading fire.  A small table and a few chairs.  A loft where a child might sleep.  A golem lifeless on the floor.

Clay Man looked at the remains of its counterpart.  The feet were about the right size to have left the tracks it found.  Larger than its own feet, but only just.  The chest was shaped differently, with small holes through which air might once have circulated.  Could it have talked?  Produced a crude piping to approximate a facsimile of language?  Or were they bored for some other purpose?  If it had spoken, it would never speak again.  The statue lay inert, life gone out of it.  Unloved and decaying into the dirt it had been fashioned from.  A tiny voice spoke from above.

“Clay man?”

It looked up as fast as its neck would bend.  Emma peeped down from the loft, eyes wide and wet with tears.  Clay Man signed up at her as best as it could with its missing fingers precluding the necessary symbols.

_ Yes.  I am here to take you home. _

She scrambled down, agile as ever.  She looked like she was going to cry.  Clay Man didn’t want her to cry.  It tried to sign that it was ok and they were going home but she didn’t look up, arms thrown around its waist as far as they could go.

“H-he tried to tell me he was my family now” she sniffled, “and that this was my home and he would take care of me-he-heee.”  The child’s voice cracked and she started to cry.  “And then- and then I waited for you, and when I woke up he was de-he-he-heeaad!”

Clay Man held Emma, waiting until her sobbing subsided into sad hiccups, then sniffles.  They gathered up enough food to sustain her on the journey back, filling a small bag they found with dried beans and lentils.  Emma did not look at the remains of the golem.  Clay Man did not sift through the assorted toys, or the small articles of clothing in the drawers.  It did not search the meager kitchen for jugs to replace the ones in their home its counterpart had smashed.  It did not sign to Emma what had happened in the woods or what it had done with the adventurers that attacked it.

It did not sign to Emma what it had found in the barn, bloated, fly ridden and stinking.

\---

Emma clung to Clay Man’s hand, wrapping her tiny fingers around one of the golem’s remaining digits.  They kept walking long after the sun had disappeared over the empty horizon of the depopulated countryside.  When the girl yawned and asked if they could stop for the night, the golem scooped her up and continued with her cradled in its arms.  In a few short minutes she was asleep, sack of legumes held tightly to her chest, lulled by the gentle rise and fall of Clay Man’s gait.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by Raising Arizona and the LISA series of games.


End file.
